use gtar and not tar under solaris

[Matthias Kilian]

On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 08:54:49PM +0200, Christian Maeder wrote:
> > Is there something like pax(1) available on solaris? If so, it
> > should be be preferred, because it's a POSIX tool, so there's some
> > hope that it behaves the same on different systems.
> 
> Yes, pax is available under solaris. I thought GNU tar is the standard
> packer under unix.

Depends on what `standard' means ;-)

- tar has been there forever on unices, with several slightly
  incompatible format extensions

- GNU tar is just another implementation, typically used on Linux, and it
  has its own incompatible format extensions.

- pax is (or should be) available everywhere, its behaviour is defined
  by POSIX, it should (by default) create archives readable by most
  tar implemenations, but almost nobody knows about it ;-)

  http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pax.html

I wonder wether Duncan did read and understood that bit of
documentation, I didn't even read all of it ;-)

> (The usage message of pax is less clear.)

The manpage (and of course the POSIX definition) are hard stuff, too.
However, to create an archive, you can use something like

$ pax -wf foo.tar directory

Ciao,
	Kili